Sometimes, you never know what you’re going to have to deal with. Today was one of those days.

95% of everything I do for Aero News comes to me by e-mail. Outlook is my friend. More than my friend, it’s my lifeline. Without it, I’m dead in the water. So imagine my dismay when I clicked on Outlook this morning and I was told that my computer was unable to open the outlook window.

I rebooted. No effect.

I went online to the Microsoft site, and ran the “Repair” utility they have for Outlook.

No effect.

I followed the instructions to delete a registry entry, a dangerous thing, to be sure.

No effect.

I re-installed Outlook.

No effect.

I finally went searching online again, and found a simple, one-line command which magically repaired the program … sort of.

First, the solution. Should you encounter this problem. Do the following.

Start->run..then type the following -> "Outlook.exe /resetnavpane"

Note there is a space between the .exe and the slash. I actually just copied the entire command out of the instructions I found online. Outlook opened up just fine, but there was a little problem. In all the other attempts to fix the problem, I killed off all my contacts. everything was gone.

“No problem,” I thought. “It’s all on my phone.” I plugged in the iPhone to synch the contacts and calendar back to Outlook.

Except somehow Outlook superceded the phone, and it suddenly the phone was devoid of contacts as well.

Yes, I have backups, but the best one was from Yahoo. Nothing is completely up to date, and I’ll have to find out which of them I’m missing as I go along. Not to mention that Yahoo file had a lot of duplications, many out of date contacts, and many I just don’t need any more.

But all was not lost. Just some. But my frustrations weren’t quite done yet.

I have several e-mail addresses that are my link to Aero-News. I had to re-create every one of those accounts, and re-create the rules I’d established to direct the e-mails into specific folders, not just dump everything into my standard inbox.

All told, I spent the entire morning dealing with this issue, because Outlook decided it wanted to take the morning off.

Most of what I’ve lost are the addresses of people I painstakingly typed in from people’s business cards after who-knows-how-many Chamber of Commerce and other networking events. It’s time to start going through the cards again and re-creating that database.

The moral of the story … back up early and back up often. I’ve never been as good about that as I should be.

But I will be now …

There was some good news today, though. As with much good news, it started out with some bad news.

On the ramp at Plant City Airport, as we were loading up the airplane to come home after the AOPA summit, I dropped my camera bag. Not far, from about maybe chest high. It’s a well-padded little backpack, and I didn’t think much about it … until I took the camera back out of the bag.

The auto-focus motor on the 55-200 lens ground and scraped and finally started to work, but it was not ever going to be right again without a lengthy and likely expensive stay at the Nikkor hospital. The UV filter was shattered.

I need my camera for my work. Seriously. I found a reputable online source and ordered both the 18-55 and the 55-200 Auto-Focus Vibration-Reducing lenses. UPS delivered them today.

It’s nice to have a couple of new lenses, and I hope it will not only be good for work, but will inspire me to go out and shoot for pleasure again.

So a good day, a bad day, a going half-mad day. At least I mostly got my problems dealt with. And the weekend is just a day away …